Sex

Amœbas at the start
Were not complex;
They tore themselves apart
And started Sex.

And Sex has ruled the earth
From then till this,
Producing woe and mirth
And pain and bliss.

Through Sex the seedling wakes
To cleave the ground;
'Tis really Sex that makes
The world go 'round.

It sublimates the mind
With noble themes,
Or sends it unrefined,
Suggestive dreams.

'Tis Sex that rules the lives
Of clods and kings;
It gives us books and wives
And other things --

Ambition, love, and strife
And all the ills
And ecstasies of life --
And Freuds and Brills.


Arthur Guiterman


Ένα αστείο μέσα στη γενικότερη χαλάρωση της άδειάς μου που ξεκινάει σήμερα.
Καλή ξεκούραση σε όλους.

ΕΝΟΣ ΛΕΠΤΟΥ ΜΑΖΙ

Jardin secret
Originally uploaded by Callixte..

Γειτονόπουλο τ’ ουρανού το σπίτι.
Τόσο ψηλά χτισμένη της προσέγγισης η τάση
επάνω σε κορφής τις ανοιχτές φτερούγες σαν
αναλόγιο ν’ αναγιγνώσκει η εκθάμβωση το ανατέλλον
το μεσουρανούν το δύον ευαγγέλιο της.

Βγαίνω στην αυλή. Με περιμένει απαστράπτουσα
με γκέμια σέλα χάμουρα η άγρια ελευθερία του ορίζοντα
ν’ ανέβω και καλπάζοντας την επαλήθευσή της να δαμάσω.
Α, μόνο το βλέμμα και το όραμα κατάφεραν να ιππεύουν
την άυλη ετούτη ατίθαση κατάκτηση.
Οι υπερφίαλες απόψεις των αιθέρων πέφτουνε τσακίζονται
διότι ελάχιστα διαρκεί το ανεμπόδιστο.

Ιδού πως σκοντάφτει σε μια σπιθαμή συρματόπλεγμα
γύρω από το χτήμα. Χαμηλό, ήμερο κι όμως
αν το καλοκοιτάξεις το καλοαισθανθείς διαιρεί
τη δική μου καλημέρα από του γείτονα
ολημερίς σύνορα φανατίζει σιωπηρά οπλίζοντας
ξερόχορτα εναντίον αδελφών τους.

Το βράδυ μόνο, η ενωτική ευωδιά του νυχτολούλουδου
το ψαλιδίζει τόπους τόπους και περνά
υπό το παράφρον φέγγος των πυγολαμπίδων
- κωλοφωτιές τις λέγαμε όταν ζούσαμε.

Αχ, ηρωισμοί εθελοντών ονείρων άδοξοι. Τι ωφελεί
να καταπατήσεις δύο πόντους φεγγαρόσκονη ακόμα
κληρονομιά που άφησε το θέρος στη φυγή του.

Άσε να τηρήσουν ενός λεπτού μαζί
κάτι αγράμματες χήρες παρατάσεις
που δεν τις πιάνει ο νόμος

αν και κανείς δεν ξέρει
τι τους επιφυλάσσει ακόμα η ελπίδα.


Καλοκαίρι, Πλάτανος – Αιγιαλεία



Κική Δημουλά
Ενός λεπτού μαζί

L’ ENNEMI

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage,
Traversé ça et là par des brillants soleils ;
Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage
Qu’il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

Voilà que j’ai touché l’automne des idées,
Et qu’il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux
Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,
Où l’eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.

Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve
Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur ?

- Ô douleur ! ô douleur ! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le cœur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie !


Ch. Baudelaire
Les fleurs du mal
Spleen et idéal

La Bella Donna della mia Mente

Centre of a Pale Rose
Originally uploaded by Colour.

My limbs are wasted with a flame,
My feet are sore with travelling,
For calling on my Lady’s name
My lips have now forgot to sing.

O Linnet in the wild-rose brake
Strain for my Love thy melody,
O Lark sing louder for love’s sake,
My gentle Lady passeth by.

She is too fair for any man
To see or hold his heart’s delight,
Fairer than Queen or courtezan
Or moon-lit water in the night.

Her hair is bound with myrtle leaves,
(Green leaves upon her golden hair!)
Green grasses through the yellow sheaves
Of autumn corn are not more fair.

Her little lips, more made to kiss
Than to cry bitterly for pain,
Are tremulous as brook-water is,
Or roses after evening rain.

Her neck is like white melilote
Flushing for pleasure of the sun,
The throbbing of the linnet’s throat
Is not so sweet to look upon.

As a pomegranate, cut in twain,
White-seeded, is her crimson mouth,
Her cheeks are as the fading stain
Where the peach reddens to the south.

O twining hands! O delicate
White body made for love and pain!
O House of love! O desolate
Pale flower beaten by the rain!

Oscar Wilde

Figs

figs
Originally uploaded by emotional anaemia.

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.

But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.
As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:
And it seems male.
But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:
The fissure, the yoni,
The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved,
Inturned,
The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;
And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.
Symbols.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;
Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

It was always a secret.
That's how it should be, the female should always be secret.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough
Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;
Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,
Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems
Openly pledging heaven:
Here's to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!
The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.

Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won't taste it;
Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,
Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,
One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;
Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,
Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,
Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilisation, and fruiting
In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see
Till it's finished, and you're over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

Till the drop of ripeness exudes,
And the year is over.

And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.
So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.
And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit
Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.
Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too.

The year is fallen over-ripe,
The year of our women.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.
The secret is laid bare.
And rottenness soon sets in.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked
She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.
She'd been naked all her days before,
But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn't had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves.
And women have been sewing ever since.
But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.
They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,
And they won't let us forget it.

Now, the secret
Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips
That laugh at the Lord's indignation.

What then, good Lord! cry the women.
We have kept our secret long enough.
We are a ripe fig.
Let us burst into affirmation.

They forget, ripe figs won't keep.
Ripe figs won't keep.

Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.
Ripe figs won't keep, won't keep in any clime.
What then, when women the world over have all bursten into affirmation?
And bursten figs won't keep?

San Gervasio.


David Herbert Lawrence

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given:
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour:
Frail spells whose utter'd charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance and mutability.
Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes;
Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!
Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not--lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard; I saw them not;
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy!

I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatch'd with me the envious night:
They know that never joy illum'd my brow
Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.


Percy Bysshe Shelley


Στο σημείωμά της στα ποιήματα το 1816, η Mary Shelley (σύζυγος του ποιητή) γράφει : " Πέρασε το καλοκαίρι στις ακτές της Λίμνης της Γενεύης. Ο "ύμνος στην πνευματική ομορφιά", συνελήφθη κατά τη διάρκεια του ταξιδιού του γύρω από την λίμνη με τον Λόρδο Byron."

Ο όρος "intellectual" πρέπει να γίνει αντιληπτός ως "εγνωσμένη από το μυαλό, χωρίς την βοήθεια της φυσικής αίσθησης" (όπως γίνεται αντιληπτό και από τους δύο πρώτους στίχους).